Quartz: Your plane could fly itself by 2025…if you’re cool with that
 

Absolutely cool with that, provided it's proven to be just as safe!

Can a computer do what Sully did?

Bingo! Until a computer can manage to pull off what Captain Sullenberger or Captain Haynes and their crews did I'll stick to flying on planes with pilots in the pointy end.

A properly-designed computer-controlled flight system would do the same thing Captain Sullenberger did: evaluate landing options, choose the best one available, and ditch in the Hudson. "Properly designed" means the system would know which parts of the airplane were functioning at all times. In this case, that would mean it would plan a landing without adding any power. Guiding the airplane into the ditching would be no different than guiding it into any other landing.

I'm very skeptical that any such system will ever be deployed though.

this is even sillier than self driving cars, in terms of the (questionable) capabilities of the first truly self driving cars, which is what everyone is rushing for simply to claim they are first

Can a computer do what Lubitz did? What about what van Zanten did? Or, you know, what Atta and his gang was able to do?Just saying, it goes both ways.

Aviation technology and automation is perenially improving. Humans will stay humans. In the future, at some point computers will be better pilots than humans. To look at it from the perspective of only today's tech is pretty shortsighted. They're not talking about eliminating pilots tomorrow.

Which questionable capabilities are these? I would bet you any sum of money that if you were to replace all of today's drivers in the US with only Google's cars, the accident and mortality rate would be lower. I have no problems with drivers who don't get tired, don't get emotional, don't get drunk or medicated, with nearly instantaneous reaction times and are able to communicate and cooperate with their fellow drivers.

I guess you'd prefer driving alongside the ones spending half their time looking at their phone, or the drunk or sleeping ones. Or is it the 99 year olds and 16 year olds who inspire your confidence?

1. Yes. A computer can absolutely do what Sully did. As long as it's programmed correctly. It's important for the people programming the automation software to do a good job, but an automated pilot is WAY safer than a human. Think about all of the recent plain crashes... one when a depressed human being flew into a mountain. One where a cocky pilot thought he could make a journey without enough fuel.... these were human errors that a computer would NEVER make.

2. Automating the flight of a plane is a lot easier than a car. It's a no brainer. Stuck being Luddites!

I' d be a little more impressed if the a/c is nearly as capable of what Haynes & crew with help from Fitch were able to do at SUX.

Good question, and I really wish computers are able to take such smart choices.

Would be interesting to see how an electronic pilot would function without full autopilot control.

And all the systems and software in the Airbus that was AF447 didn't seem to help either. Neither did the pilots.

You'll need both to get me on board and keep me on board. And the humans better low know to hand fly the aircraft.

I'm not cool with that.

No doubt about that! I am pretty sure if I can flying alone without captain & co-pilots, gate agent as well as flight attendants.

What do you think the computers on the A320 did? The computers flew the aircraft. For Airbus aircraft, the human just puts in inputs, the computers decide what to do with those inputs.

The only thing a human did that the current generation of flight computers can not do is press the ditch switch.

As for having fully automated no pilot-in-the-loop airplanes, I am not convinced that the industry will be ready for that by 2025, 2050 or later perhaps.

There are too many things that continually go wrong with air data systems that require human intervention. I am not yet convinced that computers will be able to adequately recover/fly a plane with a impaired/defective air data system.

Although AF447 clearly showed us that some humans are incapable of flying when the air data system is impaired as well........


Not quite. I think you have grossly underestimated the complexity of the systems involved and the complexity of programming for DAL-A :rolleyes:

Also, DO-178C isn't robust enough and we'd probably end up with DO-178E for automated pilot transport category aircraft.


AF447 was primarily pilot error. The air data system was impaired, the pilot flying did not know how to handle an aircraft with an impaired air data system and when some of the flight envelope protections we removed.